Even the snow is tired of falling. It hangs, floating in midair, drifting every way but down. Or so it seems.

Snow or no, I must go out today. I must go to the Post Office, my least favorite place in town, not excluding the colonoscopy clinic. If you could see our post office — it’s called “Gracie Station,” but all grace ends with the name — you’d understand; it is one of the dreariest relics of Fifties functionalism that’s still standing. A blank barn of a room with too much fluorescent lighting and counters that look as though they’d been thrown up in an emergency, the place makes you wonder if Joe Stalin didn’t win the Cold War, after all. Because this is a place where you expect to have your papers examined by petulant and capricious clerks who might just for the hell of it dispatch you to a gulag. I won’t say that the post office clerks are nasty, but you can’t wonder that they hate working there. It doesn’t help that the neighborhood’s affluent citizens rely on their office mail rooms, setting an Emma Lazarus default on the already cheerless atmosphere.

And I’ve a yen for Shake Shack that nothing else will appease. This is just the day for sitting outside, no? I think, if I get there early enough, there won’t be a crowd and I’ll find a table inside. But I never do get there early enough. That’s to say that I don’t even try, because by the time I’m ready to leave the house it’s too late.

I hope that the snow isn’t spoiling Will. Who knows when we’ll have so much again? Not that we played in it on Sunday, when I took him for a walk. We watched the dogs in Tomkins Square Park, coming and going (completely different crowds), trudged down Ninth Street to St Mark’s Bookshop, comme d’habitude, and stopped at Dinosaur Hill on the way back. When he is in the carrier, strapped to my chest, Will doesn’t interact with the world very much, although this week he did give the dogs some attention. But the moment he was planted back on the floor, back at home, he made a beeline for the front door and beamed at me with Harpo-Marx intensity.

Something else that he did that was neat to watch: he was playing with something at the table that was not food. At least twice, I saw him push it to the edge but then stop pushing. He’s done the gravity thing. For half of last year, he broke me up by staring down at things that he’d just given the heave-ho to, as if his special eye-power would levitate them back up. He appears to have tired of that experiment.

Now, if I can just throw on some clothes really quick and get out of here…

… success! Shake Shack was super, and I had a table to myself the entire time. I read Matthew Gallaway’s The Metropolis Case while I nibbled away at a Shackburger, krinkly fries, and, of course, a chocolate shake.

But was I trying to make predictions about how awful the post office would be? Three windows were open: one for special delivery and supplies, one for stamps and money orders, and one — just one — for all the other things that you have to go to the post office to take care of, because they’re cumbersome and time-consuming. The minutes flew by like hours, without anyone in the entire joint moving more than an inch in any direction. Just one. But it got done.

We are big fans of French finance minister Christine Lagarde — she sounds like a genuine mother superior, someone who really knows how to get things done. Or, failing that, to sound like she does. You can bet that, this time around, the stress test of PIGS banks is going to be substantive, and that there won’t be any loose talk about “harmonization.”

Before the related issue of restructuring the mountain of bad debts at European banks can be addressed, Ms. Lagarde said, European countries need to conduct meaningful tests on the health of their lenders’ balance sheets. Such stress tests have been carried out twice during the current crisis but failed to win investor confidence. Since the last round, published in July 2010, further problems have emerged, notably at Spanish and Irish lenders. The results of the latest tests are expected to be published in June.

“We will test banks in a very comprehensive manner and a more credible fashion than we did last summer,” she said. “We need to improve the overall credibility of the process, and that includes communication, range, scope, a combination of bottom up, top down quality control.”

She argued that in France, at least, there is no sense that taxpayers are losing out as government bail out their banks without asking bondholders to take write-offs, known as haircuts. Paris set up facilities to help its banks in 2008 and 2009, but it was not on the scale of the assistance required in countries like Ireland and Britain. “My taxpayers are quite happy because they have collected fees — or, rather, interest rates — and they haven’t paid anything.” she said, adding that investors in many euro-zone countries had already been losing money without a coordinated restructuring.“Ask the Anglo Irish shareholders if they’ve taken a hit or not,” she said, referring to the debt-laden Irish lender, which has proved an Achilles’ heel for the economy of that country.

Gerritsen Beach seems about as far from our part of the world as it’s possible to go — and still be part of New York City. You can’t get there on a subway, but that’s true of many neighborhoods. There’s a volunteer fire department — I have no idea how unusual that is, but it seems odd. But what gets me is this story, from the blog GerritsenBeach.net, about teenaged hooligans locking patrons in a laundromat that’s owned by a Chinese woman; they do this “at least once a day” for the fun of winding her up. NYPD does not appear to be much of a presence in Gerritsen Beach.

Reading a spate of recent blog entries, however, we came across nothing to do with Tim Stellon’s story about Daniel Cavanaugh, the man behind the blog, and the trouble that he’s in with neighbors who would prefer that the larger world continue to ignore goings-on in their enclave.

At 8:48 the next morning, he posted “No Police Response Despite Massive Damage by Local Teens.” It included more than a dozen photos of the offending youths, along with images of public Facebook profiles. Status updates described pelting the police and breaking bus windows.

Two days later, when the property owners’ association held its monthly meeting, the audience railed against Mr. Cavanagh.

In a video of that meeting posted on the blog Sheepshead Bites, Renee Sior-Cullen — whose son had been shown on Mr. Cavanagh’s blog — said the boy was just a 12-year-old trying to impress his older brothers. Ms. Sior-Cullen also charged that what Mr. Cavanagh did with her son’s Facebook posts was criminal.

“It is illegal for a grown man to take a minor’s post and copy it and repost it,” said Ms. Sior-Cullen, who did not respond to requests for an interview.

Ms Sior-Cullen is worthy of Melissa Leo’s Alice, in The Fighter.

How can a collection of letters between two middle-aged women, writing in the 1950s, be monumental? It’s taking a while to sort that out. What’s not in doubt is that As Always, Julia: Food, Friendship & the Making of a Masterpiece is a monument. The letters running back and forth between Julia Child and Avis DeVoto are a great read, but the book itself is a commemorative object,  preserving the record of something important. The ‘something important’ isn’t the back-story to Mastering the Art of French Cooking  or the How-Julia-Got-Famous legend. What I mean is the testament to exceptional humanity that exudes from the correspondence. (Never has an exchange of letters more ardently lived up to that term!) My talk of monuments and exceptional humanity might conjure expectations of heroism and bravado that the book will disappoint, but I’ll take that risk and venture to propose other expectations: what we find in these letters is the ready ability to make truly interesting writing out of everyday whole cloth, and perhaps because I am in late middle age myself I find ordinary life more challenging than emergencies, precisely because the challenge of the ordinary, unlike that of an emergency, can be disregarded with impunity. You can just look the other way while your life courses through the neck of the hourglass. People do it all the time. (How else to explain television?) Avis and Julia were fortunate women, and they knew it; and we know it because their letters are imbued with a gratitude that takes the form of attentive appreciation of the world before them. The letters, no less than the great cookbook, repay good fortune by opening it up to us. 

As the years passed by — the letters span for nearly a decade, from early 1952 to the spring of 1961 — I was tickled by an idle conundrum: to what extent were these women feminists? From one perspective, neither was interested in what we call women’s issues. They came from relatively lofty backgrounds (Julia especially), were highly educated and well-traveled, and married interesting, good-natured men — whom they loved. They were not unhappy with the prosperous housewife’s calendar of duties, and Avis appears to have been a doting mother. It’s clear that Julia occupied a remarkably unusual position in American culture, in that she practiced a domestic art with professional rigor, keeping her eye on the ball while extending a vaguely maternal welcome. Because no one with a voice like hers had ever appeared regularly on television, she was a sensation in the way that maiden aunts can be sensational: unintentionally funny but wholly endearing. (As the years passed by — the real ones, I mean — we would learn that there was nothing ridiculous about the woman.) Because she had so little to do with the general idea of “femininity,” there was little to antagonize the feminists. There she was, counseling housewives to spend hours over hot stoves, because it was fun.

Whether anyone would listen to her was very much the matter that the publishers disputed. Like the women’s magazines, which consistently refused to print any of the recipes that would go into Mastering the Art, the businessmen at Houghton, Mifflin foresaw the dismay with which “housewife/chauffeurs” would recoil from the book’s exhaustive instructions. William Koshland, at Knopf, in contrast, saw that the instructions would make good cooking easier — because they were clear, lucid, good instructions. Once you familiarize yourself with the method for making a soufflé, and commit a few measurements to memory, making a soufflé is as straightforward as making a ham sandwich, and you never have to look at a cookbook again. This distinction, with some people seeing enlightening complexity where others see alarming complication, does not run on an axis that is easily oriented to arguments for and against feminism. That’s why the conundrum is idle: it doesn’t matter whether Julia and Avis were feminists. They were passionate Democrats!

It did not take long for me to decide that Avis was the more natural writer. Not the better writer, necessarily, but the one more compelled to express herself in prose. (I don’t begin to know enough about her long association with Bread Loaf to understand how it failed to inspire her to have her own career as a writer.) Hers is the greater emotional range, and hers the wider array of registers. She also wrote more — much more, if you discount Julia’s discussions of her book. As the mother of two young men — the book ends, quite sweetly, with her offer to get Harvard Commencement tickets for the Childs; her son, Mark (who turned 71 the other day), was about to graduate — and the wife of a college professor, Avis was in touch with youthful speech patterns, and her tone is often what used to be called ‘smart.’ “Everybody horribly restless because after four-day frightful heat wave a real humdinger of a storm is toying with us…” At the risk of confusing apples with oranges, I’d have to say that Avis’s style is what the French call BCBG — bon chic, bon genre. For all her housewifely devotion, you can imagine Avis rewriting the Cindi Lauper song: “Girls Just Get to Have Fun.” Not that they get to have just fun. In the middle of the book’s time span, Bernard suffers a fatal heart attack in a New York hotel room, and Avis’s devastation is marked mostly by silence. A slightly more distant passing, however, prompts a profoundly memorable letter to Julia:

I wrote you a note from St Petersburg and I hope it reached you. My old pa telephoned Sunday midnight last week to say my mother had just died in the hospital. He was all in pieces and wanted me to come down so I flew down next day and took over. It was a rugged five days, and I thank God is all I can say that it was so quick. Cancer of the breast, and two more weeks in hospital and then all over. She was lucky. So was Dad and he knows it now. The thing I have always dreaded most is having either of them require long nursing, which is so terrible for everybody and would pretty well put me in the soup financially as well. I had to arrange everything, and funerals in the hinterland are something — viewing of the remains and all that. But it all went off rather smoothly, none of the horrors I had expected, and I cleared everything of hers out of the apartment, but quick. Only thing to do. Incredible woman. She saved things like the Collier brothers. Eighteen boxes of notepaper and she used to write me on the backs of old Christmas cards. Unopened boxes of stockings I had sent her. Forty years of medical clippings, some of them yellow with age and quite outdated. And yet when she was sickshe never wanted anybody to know anything about it until it was over, for which I am deeply grateful. Nobody but Dad knew she was in the hospital this time. I never got along with her, but I will hand her this, and it’s a great deal — she never clung, or whined or complained, and she let me live my own life. 

My father is 86, thin and reasonably spry and except for bad eyes, in good health. He seems to be the only Democrat in St Petersburg and we cheered each other up considerably by discussing politics, about which he knows a great deal. He’s a cutie — Scotch and deadpan and full of wry humor. And now an old, old man. St Petersburg is about as non-U a place as there is in this country — dreary beyond measure to me, but he is rather used to it now. And by God they do take care of the old people — everyone exceedingly kind and gentle and friendly. Living is incredibly cheap. Cafeterias are just wonderful. For a dollar and a quarter you can get a big piece of good roast beef and everything that goes with it, good vegetables, fine salads, and superlative apple pie. He does this once a day, and picks up his other two meals in his own little kitchen. Not much appetite at that age, so I left him three bottles of rye with orders to take a little nip in the evening, for his appetite’s sake. He ate lunch and dinner with me at the hotel while I was there and had a drink each time — the first in years. His landlady is one of those wonderful lower middle class types who never read a book in her life, but is pure gold, full of energy and kindness. And he has many friends close by. So I will try not to fret about him. But he knows and I know that the next call from St Petersburg will probably be for me to go down and bury him. Such a nice man. And it’s just hell to be old and have no function in life.

There is nothing like this in Julia’s letters. Nothing quite so personal (about another person), and nothing quite so detailed (about another person’s life). The material is instinctively well-organized, The two paragraphs share an emotional trajectory, beginning with a generalized, social sorrow (the death of a parent; the dreariness of retirement communities), passing into engaging anecdote (the things her mother hoarded; her father’s diet), and concluding on a note of intense but restrained regret (“I never got along with her”; “But he knows and I knows and I know…”).What Avis has fashioned of her grief is nothing less than a pair of fine silhouettes of her parents; one can almost see them hanging on the wall, in matching oval frames. The world of Mastering the Art couldn’t be further away from the atmosphere of cached stockings and cafeteria roast beef — or so you might think. In fact, as this book of letters shows again and again, one of the finest and most useful treatises ever published was brought forth by two American women who were remarkably open to life, and cheerfully rueful about shrugging off its banalities.

Gretchen Morgenson is shocked, shocked to report that $132 million in “taxpayer money” has been spent on the defense of three former Fannie Mae executives in myriad lawsuits. A stark paragraph in her piece (reeking of editorial insertion) reminds readers that such indemnification of legal expenses is perfectly — if regrettably — normal. It is perhaps too much to expect of a civil servant functioning as an “acting director” to ask Edward DeMarco to rock the bloat.  

Richard S. Carnell, an associate professor at Fordham University Law School who was an assistant secretary of the Treasury for financial institutions during the 1990s, questions why Mr. Raines, Mr. Howard and others, given their conduct detailed in the Housing Enterprise Oversight report, are being held harmless by the government and receiving payment of legal bills as a result.

“Their duty of loyalty required them to put shareholders’ interests ahead of their own personal interests,” Mr. Carnell said. “Had they cared about the shareholders, they would not have staked Fannie’s reputation on dubious accounting. They defied their duty of loyalty and served themselves. At a moral level, they don’t deserve indemnification, much less payment of such princely sums.”

Asked why it has not cut off funding for these mounting legal bills, Edward J. DeMarco, the acting director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, said: “I understand the frustration regarding the advancement of certain legal fees associated with ongoing litigation involving Fannie Mae and certain former employees. It is my responsibility to follow applicable federal and state law. Consequently, on the advice of counsel, I have concluded that the advancement of such fees is in the best interest of the conservatorship.”

Matins

¶ At GOOD, Noam Ross asks, “If Everyone Moves to the City, What Gets Left Behind?” His accompanying graphic is a bit less exciting. Although China’s rural population is predicted to drop by half, 2000-2050, the rest of Asia and Africa look to be stable. The thin slice of country-dwellers in Europe, the Americas, and Oceania is expected to drop by about a third. Still, this is an interesting think piece. One thing that goes unmentioned is that rural poverty will probably increase sharply in regions not served by railroads. ¶ Also at GOOD, an important word about elevators, which Alex Goldmark rightly calls the capillaries of urban life.

Lauds

¶ No one is going to be surprised that we wish the Guardian had spoken a little more firmly: “Behind the music: Why music education cuts could be a dumb move.” Could be?  How on earth are talented kids who don’t happen to be rich going to be discovered and nurtured without publicly-funded programs? Scratching our heads about Helienne Lindvall‘s version of this perennial story, we wondered if there’s a positive explanation for why music ed is always the first to go in Anglophone schools: it’s classical, and our natural tradition is vernacular. (Can there be any doubt that English-speaking writers and composers, born no matter where, have generated the richest spectrum of popular song forms?) This is no excuse for failing to educate children in the arts, but understanding the weakness of political support is a start. (via Arts Journal) ¶ In “Link Rot,” Connor O’Brien wants us to bear in mind how easily the whole Internet thing could callapse into a state of 404. Of course we already knew how right he is but his talking about it gave us asthsma. (The Bygone Bureau)

Prime

¶ We’re hoping that Max Chafkin‘s much-talked-about Norway piece, “In Norway, Start-ups Say Ja to Socialism,” inaugurates a truly serious examination of the relation between rates of taxation and prosperity. It seems, offhand, to be the very reverse of what the Reaganauts told us it was. “Socialism” seems a strong word for the Norwegian régime, which tolerates, after all, the likes of coiffeur-queen Inger Ellen Nicolaisen, the “Donald Trump of Norway.” She pays plenty beaucoup taxes, but she still owns plenty beaucoup. We don’t remember plenty beaucoup property rights as a feature of textbook socialism. Chafkin’s piece is a must-read, even though, at the end of the day, there are only five million Norwegians to share all that North Sea oil. ¶ At Weakonomics, Philip touchingly wonders if capitalism might be at an “inflection point,” by which he means (and hopes) that capitalists might see the advantage of taking a longer view than the quarterly. (No doubt, that sounds like socialism!) We quite agree with the point that he makes toward the end of the entry: “I like to support programs that solve problems before they start…” Poor corporate governance is definitely the place where trouble starts.  

Tierce

¶ A recent study correlating two genes with behavioral probability, one with friendship and one with aversion, is almost laughingly preliminary and — literally — precocious. The correlations may have been established, but working out their meanings, much less their mechanics, will take years, if only to amass correlations for hundreds if not thousands of other genes. But the research is probably on the right track, and it will be fought vehemently by people who refuse to recognize free will as an unpredictable distallate of chaotic events, deterministic at the atomic level but not higher up. Patrick Morgan reports at Discoblog. ¶ We’re wondering if there’s a gene that explains why some people get worried about whether one or two spaces follows the full stop. We strongly believe in inserting two spaces between the abbreviation for a state and the ZIP code on an evelope, but that’s not what’s agitating Farhad Manjoo.  We’re having so many problems with the idiocies of Platform WordPress that we don’t feel entitled to venture an opinion. (Slate)

Sext

¶ The bloom is definitely off the rose so far as business blogging is concerned. Ben Bradley, a marketer in Illinois, told Lisa Bertagnoli that blogging “wasn’t a giant time investment, but I’d rather be on the phone with a client.” Plus,  sales calls were whoppingly more effective. (via The Awl) ¶ Leigh Alexander catalogues Five Emotions Invented By The Internet. Unfortunately, they go unnamed. “The need to say something has lapsed and leaves a dim, fatigued sensation in its place. In advanced cases, a sensation approximating ‘headache’ but not as tangible nor identifiable as ‘headache’ sets in.” We think that Alexander must have been reading Oblomov. (Thought Catalog, via kottke.org)

Nones

¶ Meet Ahmet Davutoglu, Turkey’s foreign minister. James Traub profiles the man from Konya who both intellectually and diplomatically argues for Turkey’s importance in international affairs — not as the “sick man of Europe,” but as quite the opposite, a conciliating power. Mr Davutoglu’s program may have been swamped by the Mavi Marmara incident, and Traub suggests that he may have overestimated Turkey’s importance — a possibility that would not surprise his critics. (NYT)  ¶ Faced with one of Edward Hugh‘s prodigiously comprehensive analyses of economic developments, we glance over the introduction and shoot straight to the conclusion, which in the case of “Turkey’s Audacious Experiment In ‘Post-Modern’ Monetary Policy“ provides a persuasive examination of the factors that have put Turkey on a path that’s contrary to ours (and to Europe’s as well);  beyond that, you’ll get a sense of why the outlook for “young” economies — which unlike ours are not immediately saddled with the problem of ageing populations — is so rosy. (A Fistful of Euros) BTW: How to deal with the problem of ageing populations? Throw open the doors to immigration, that’s how!

Vespers

¶ Rodney Welch writes lucidly and with great pleasure about two of Henry James’s three big late novels — The Ambassadors and The Golden Bvwl — which have at long last appeared in Library of America volumes. (The Millions)

You’re in the company of a writer who sees and imagines in depth. I occasionally thought “Where is he going with this?” but I also thought “I can’t wait to see where he goes with this.” There’s a purpose behind those metaphors – he wants you to see, to visualize the inner life of his characters. He knows how people think, and he has a superb sense of how they reveal themselves, the way looks give away clues, the way people may not even know their own mind until they see another person’s reaction. These novels are set against great geographical backdrops and big fancy homes, but all the action is inside, where people plot, conceal, and create. These novels are broad French comedies and existential mysteries, stories you understand piece-meal, along with the characters, who are feeling and (quite often) thinking their way through.

¶ “So what are we to make of the Major and his minors?” asks Brooks Peters, in an essay at Open Book about the ardent canoeist, naturist, and ephebist, Rowland Raven-Hart, a tall, thin, bearded gent who appears to have had no trouble in the world picking up legions of comely youths to accompany him on his paddlings through Europe and elsewhere. Prepare for Major eye-rolling, is what we make of it.

Compline

¶ Do we value killing? This odd question is posed by philosopher Alva Noë, at NPR’s 13.7. Grappling with the Tucson shootings, Noë argues that emergencies, far from triggering instinctive responses, reveal our values; and that the contingencies of the event determine which values will be revealed. “Why is one man a war criminal, and the other a great soldier? Look to the situations in which they respectively find themselves to answer this.” (via Arts Journal) ¶ Any doubts that American society values killing will be killed by Charles Blow‘s graphic report, correlating firearms possessions with per capita homicides. The United States is in a class by itself, it seems. (Any doubts that handguns have any other purpose than to wound and kill other human beings ought to be cleared up by a moment’s sober and honest thought.) (NYT)

Have a Look

¶ Felicia Honkasolo. (The Best Part)

Noted

¶ “How to Actually Read Things on the Internet.” (My Life Scoop)

¶ Dan Hill’s illustrated account of the Australian floods. (City of Sound)

¶ The Philosophical Novel. By the way, what would David Foster Wallace have looked like had a good barber tended his hair? (NYT)

Holland Cotter captures a moment in New York’s artly life that spun bravely at the Tibor de Nagy gallery in the early Fifties: a collaboration of painting and poetry in which the poetry was arguably the more remarkable partner. But the paintings still gleam, poised beautifully between the bellows of Abstract Expressionism and the banalities of Pop.

And a scene it was: amorous, rivalrous and incestuous; at once an avant-garde and — much like the New York art world at present — an avant-garde in reverse. Poetry was pushing into prickly new territory, while art was revisiting old ground, although with some new moves. What made the situation at Tibor de Nagy distinctive was that almost everyone was collaborating, artists and poets alike.

Remember the context. This was the high moment of Abstract Expressionism, with its image of the heroic artist battling his way alone toward some existential sublime. Set that image against another: O’Hara and Rivers, lovers at the time, sitting knee to knee as they worked on a series of jointly made lithographs, each adding drawings, jokes, notes to friends and poems like valentines.

Or consider the poetry books coming out under the Tibor de Nagy imprint, among them Mr. Ashbery’s first collection, with drawings by Ms. Freilicher, and O’Hara’s 1953 “Oranges,” with hand-painted covers by Hartigan. These weren’t weighty tomes. They were pretty pamphlets, so thin and fragile as to be all but invisible on a library shelf.

The Fighter, on the face of it, would not seem to be my kind of movie, and I went to it reluctantly. I did think that I ought to see it, and not just because of the Oscar buzz. Mark Wahlberg and Amy Adams are two stars who have never let me down, and I’d heard really great things about Melissa Leo. I’d like to say that Christian Bale was a draw, too, but although his work has always been interesting, it has also seemed intended to cloak the actor in plain sight, as though movie-making were the best way in the world of maintaining a very private life. It is also true that Mr Bale has never to my knowledge played the part of a character whom I’d want to grow up to be. Certainly this last part hasn’t been changed by David Russell’s film. Even after his dramatic conversion experience, Dickie Eklund remains an unattractive piece of work. But I came out of the theatre thrilled to death by the power of what I’d just seen, and I hope that no one will miss The Fighter because it’s “about boxing.” 

And it is about boxing. There were passages of family drama that led me to suspect that the pugilistics might be backgrounded, but that’s not what happens. In fact, I have never seen a movie that made boxing look so interestting. The final bout transformed me into a Mexican jumping bean, swaying with each blow; it’s a good thing that I sit in the back of the theatre. While nothing could ever make a boxing fan out of me, I saw that Mr Russell had always kept in view a distinction that Micky Ward (Mark Wahlberg) makes at the beginning, when he’s explaining boxing to Charlene (Amy Adams). There’s brawling, which is just guys exchanging blows, and there’s boxing, which is more like chess. Comparing boxing to chess might sound laughable, and most filmmakers would ask us to accept it on faith, but Mr Russell provides something close to a laboratory demonstration of the similarities. In almost every boxing scene that I’ve ever sat through, there’s a sense from the start that the fighters are giving their all to trying to win, as quickly as possible. But that’s not Micky Ward’s game, That Ward has a game is interesting. 

But I didn’t care about The Fighter because of the fighting. The multi-credited screenplay is a match of sorts between two venerable story lines. The one is a family tragedy: a heroic character isn’t strong enough, or mean enough, or whatever-you-like enough to step outside a toxic family circle, possibly because he is as addicted to the company of his relations as they’re addicted to trouble. The other is the modern American tale of rehab. The moment in which we find that we believe in the rehabilitation of Dickie Eklund, a former crack addict ( as well as the boxer who taught his little brother Micky everything he knows), the family tragedy story turns into a comeback story, and a very believable one. By this time, Micky has put together a team of supporters who agree on nothing so much as the importance of keeping Dickie out of Micky’s life. When Micky can’t decide between the warring camps (which we’re inclined, even though the movie turns out not to do, to see as good guys versus bad guys), his new friends leave him, and you think, uh-oh, so much for Micky.

But Dickie is awakened by their defection; and instead of taking advantage of his restored command of the field (as Micky’s trainer) he reaches out for the defectors’ support. As Charlene and O’Keefe (Mickey O’Keefe plays himself) understand, Micky’s dependence on his brother’s good advice is not weak or self-destructive: Dickie really does know the best moves. He also knows his brother better than anyone else. They don’t like Dickie, but they know that, so long as he’s clean, they have no good excuse for not working with him, so they undergo conversion experiences of their own. (Ms Adams is so good at registering the course of Charlene’s faith in Dickie that you think that you’re reading her mind.) It’s at this very point that the boxing story sweeps to the foreground for a stirring climax — a climax that would work out very differently if Micky’s various friends weren’t determined to get together to support him. 

Melissa Leo plays Alice Ward, the much-married mother of nine, among them the two boxers and six harridan Valkyries who hang out in her home and amplify her signs and signals. Alice is very much a type, but I’ve never seen the equal of Ms Leo’s impersonation. A hard and brittle hustler who’s too sentimental to grasp that she routinely favors her black sheep son, Dickie, over the straight-shooting Micky, Alice is all but blind to Dickie’s addiction. She’s as out of touch with reality as any of Tennessee Williams’s wilting Southern belles, but, being a lot tougher, she is not broken by the shattering portrayal of her family in an HBO documentary that is shown midway through the film. It’s unclear what she knows in advance about this project; one suspects that she has taken Dickie’s assurance that it’s about his comeback as the pride of Lowell, Massachusetts at his word. In fact, we don’t know different until just before the broadcast. The subject of the documentary is crack, and how completely it can ruin the life of someone like Dickie. It ends with his being led off to prison. In an addled attempt to raise money for Micky’s training, Dickie impersonates cops and shakes down the johns who pick up his tarts. It doesn’t take long for this scheme to come crashing down around him. Even for Alice, though, “documentary” doesn’t mean quite what it ought to, and when Dickie comes out of prison, she is almost eager to resume enabling him. She at risk of helping both of her sons right back into disappointment and failure. If The Fighter has a disappointment, it’s that Ms Leo is never given a scene to correspond to Mr Bale’s. 

Whether or not the filmmakers intended any such message, I watched The Fighter as itself something of a documentary, about the failure of our economy to provide millions of Americans with meaningful occupations even as it drowns them in consumerist trash. It is difficult to imagine why anyone with a interesting, well-paid job would take up professional boxing, and The Fighter does nothing to make it any easier.  

Mary Williams Walsh‘s front-page story about “state bankruptcy” reminded us of the combination of dithering leadership and intransigent special interests that brought the ancien régime to its knees in 1789 (curiously, the first full year of governance under our current Constitution).

House Republicans, and Senators from both parties, have taken an interest in the issue, with nudging from bankruptcy lawyers and a former House speaker, Newt Gingrich, who could be a Republican presidential candidate. It would be difficult to get a bill through Congress, not only because of the constitutional questions and the complexities of bankruptcy law, but also because of fears that even talk of such a law could make the states’ problems worse.

Lawmakers might decide to stop short of a full-blown bankruptcy proposal and establish instead some sort of oversight panel for distressed states, akin to the Municipal Assistance Corporation, which helped New York City during its fiscal crisis of 1975.

Still, discussions about something as far-reaching as bankruptcy could give governors and others more leverage in bargaining with unionized public workers.

“They are readying a massive assault on us,” said Charles M. Loveless, legislative director of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees. “We’re taking this very seriously.”

[snip]

Many analysts say they consider a bond default by any state extremely unlikely, but they also say that when politicians take an interest in the bond market, surprises are apt to follow.

Public-sector workers versus municipal bondholders: a hardly unimaginable fight that no one seems to want to be bothered to imagine.

We can’t decide if Anthony Tommasini‘s talk of “making the cut” — as he puts together his list of top-ten classical composers — is silly or just plain odious. Here we find him struggling to make a decision about Chopin, about whom he writes very well.

Chopin, the most original genius of the 19th century, is a good example. Striving for greatness was the last thing on his mind. Chopin had his own select list of past greats he revered, topped by Bach and Mozart. And he loved bel canto opera, especially by that melancholic melodist Bellini.

But the Beethoven symphonic imperative that hung over and intimidated his fellow composers meant nothing to Chopin. He did not care about writing large, formal works, certainly not symphonies. Even his Second and Third Piano Sonatas (the First is an early work), though astounding, are completely unconventional. Chopin respected his composer colleagues, but he was not especially interested in their work. He was a pianist who composed. To him there was no distinction between the activities. And he seldom performed piano works by other composers.

Beethoven consciously strove to be great, even titanic, and he thought he was. His legacy is defined by intimidating bodies of symphonies, string quartets, piano sonatas and more, now canonic. How does an individualist like Chopin “rank” in comparison? Chopin’s ethereal nocturnes, poetic ballades, audacious scherzos, aptly titled impromptus and lacy waltzes often sound like written-out improvisations.

It seems to us that Chopin’s success at honoring Bach and Mozart (and Scarlatti) while remaining outside the shadow of Beethoven is reason alone to place him in the pantheon — a pantheon built to honor however many great composers there are, not an arbitrary “top 10.”

If I’m a bit worn out today, it’s because I spent yesterday in the kitchen, making a batch of tomato soup, a boeuf à la bourguignonne, and a dozen dinner rolls. Actually, I wish I knew a recipe the yielded a dozen dinner rolls, but I’ve never seen one; most yield about two dozen, which is far too many. My solution yesterday was to make a loaf from half of the dough. And what do you know? The result is much more like the better store-bought sandwich bread than anything I’ve ever made. Is it the egg? The buttermilk? Interestingly, it takes on a slightly funny flavor when toasted. And using the tall and narrow loaf pan was a mistake. This is bread that wants to be squat.

As for the boeuf… The Creuset dutch oven had been in the oven for about forty minutes when it struck me that the kitchen was too hot. I took out the stew and was dismayed to see that it was boiling. I turned the oven down, from 325º to 300º, just to jigger the thermostat spring, which evidently hadn’t budged when I’d lowered the temperature from 450º. (The 450º setting was for an eight-minute searing of the browned, flour-dusted stew meat.) Of all the times for the oven to fritz out! Happily, I was there and I caught it. But at the end of the cooking time, the results, if not nearly as dire as Julie Powell’s (in Julie & Julia), were pretty dry. What ought to have been 2½ cups of sauce came to just over half of a cup. My improvisation was to stir in a lot of beef broth and about a half cup of cream into the sauce, and boil it down. Reduced, this amplified sauce tasted good but wasn’t very thick. Nevertheless, I decided that I’d fiddled with it enough. The pearl onions and the mushrooms, cooked separately, brightened the stew’s flavor, but the meat — well, there’s no doubting that that meat has been stewed.

The tomato soup remains to be puréed. After spinning in the Cuisinart for four minutes, batches of the soup are pressed through a chinois. I’ll get to it tomorrow… or maybe the next day.

A former national security adviser on China, Kenneth Lieberthal, when asked by the Times about the results of the meetings between Presidents Obama and Hu, said that it was pretty much all rhetoric. ““But at least new rhetoric is better than nothing.”

Both leaders should also reap domestic political benefits from their meeting. Mr. Hu’s enhanced stature, American analysts say, should help him tamp down political forces that have driven a more aggressive foreign policy and hamstrung relations with the United States and China’s Pacific neighbors in the last year.

Mr. Hu and China’s prime minister, Wen Jiabao, “realize this assertiveness based in the last year on nationalism and the belief that the U.S. is declining has gotten them into deep trouble,” said Joseph S. Nye Jr., the dean at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard and a State Department and Pentagon official in the Carter and Clinton administrations. Mr. Nye was in Washington for a luncheon with Mr. Hu at the State Department. “They think a summit which could be played as a success can give them ammunition to quiet down this rumbling below in the ranks.”

For his part, Mr. Obama comes away from the visit with a new reputation for toughness in his China policy, something that is likely to please conservatives and some liberals alike.

“Area President Whistles Happy Tunes.”

Sam Sifton on Lyon, which opened in the old Café de Bruxelles space on Greenwich Avenue, under the auspices of an owner of the late, lamented La Goulue.

The restaurant is warm and welcoming, already more a neighborhood draw than a publicist’s undertaking, with celebrity sightings limited to Michael Moore and a war reporter or two. You might see young professionals crushed into a corner, catching up (“You’re moving to Elkhart? Where is that, Illinois? Indiana?”) or literary people polishing their eyeglasses in pairs as they talk about art. No fewer than three tables one recent night were populated by women eating salad and talking about the economy, everyone slugging down wine.

Add the scent of Gauloises, a dog or two under the tables, and we might be down the street from the Hôtel de Ville, and not from poor, dark St. Vincent’s, waiting for its fate. Lyon is that close to soaring.

[snip]

Restaurants are central to the process by which nature becomes a form of culture. At their best they are where we go to experience, and celebrate, the transformation.

As Mr Sifton says, Lyon isn’t there yet, but we’ hope that management is listening.

Until last night, I hadn’t heard of Karen Owen and her PowerPoint presentation. Ms Owen, an undergraduate at Duke University, decided to treat thirteen college athletes with whom she had sex as “subjects” of a faux-sociological report — which is to say that she rated them with astringent candor. Having read about the presentation in Caitlin Flanagan’s aghast article in The Atlantic, I can see that there’s no need to continue beyond the first couple of slides. 

But the 42 slides of Owen’s report on her “horizontal academics” are so dense with narrative detail, bits of dialogue, descriptions of people and places, and reproduced text-message conversations that they are a chore to read. It’s as though two impulses are at war with one another: the desire to recount her sexual experiences in a hyper-masculine way—marked by locker-room crudeness and PowerPoint efficiency—fighting against the womanly desire to luxuriate in the story of it all.

A chore to read at best. A Calvary, I should think, for her family. If nothing else, it confirms my ancient convinction that, classrooms aside, male and female students ought not to share the same campus. 

Sex education needs a serous re-think: the sexes need to be taught about one anotheer. It would appear the learning the mechanics of the thing is the least of the problem that faces young people. Boys in addition need to learn that gratifying their own desires, whatever these might be, is always less important than respecting the human independence of their partner(s). This principle is right up there with the prohibition of murder and the rules against stealing things. Which brings me to the other Atlantic article that I read last night, Natasha Vargas-Cooper’s pornography update, “Hard Core.” Vargas-Cooper grasps an aspect of sexuality that doesn’t, I think, get enough frank discussion; when it comes up, it’s tarted up as “role-playing.” I’m speaking of power, as in the exercise of — and the tremendous ambivalence that men feel in the face of a partner’s surrender. 

Never was this made plainer to me than during a one-night stand with a man I had actually known for quite a while. A polite, educated fellow with a beautiful Lower East Side apartment invited me to a perfunctory dinner right after his long-term girlfriend had left him. We quickly progressed to his bed, and things did not go well. He couldn’t stay aroused. Over the course of the tryst, I trotted out every parlor trick and sexual persona I knew. I was coquettish then submissive, vocal then silent, aggressive then downright commandeering; in a moment of exasperation, he asked if we could have anal sex. I asked why, seeing as how any straight man who has had experience with anal sex knows that it’s a big production and usually has a lot of false starts and abrupt stops. He answered, almost without thought, “Because that’s the only thing that will make you uncomfortable.” This was, perhaps, the greatest moment of sexual honesty I’ve ever experienced—and without hesitation, I complied. This encounter proves an unpleasant fact that does not fit the feminist script on sexuality: pleasure and displeasure wrap around each other like two snakes.

Although Vargas-Cooper doesn’t seem terribly upset by her encounter with the “polite, educated fellow” — educated in what? — it made me sick that anyone would corrupt an intimate encounter by asking to inflict pain — to introduce an absolute distance. (I hope that you grasp the difference between wanting to make someone else uncomfortable — this fellow’s stated objective — and asking to “try something out” that, while causing some discomfort, might also afford the partner a kinky sexual satisfaction.) I’m not shocked by the desire, but the guy’s bad manners are astonishing. Not that there is anything about Vargas-Cooper’s report that likens him to a rapist. He seems to have remained “polite” in bed (his problem, perhaps?). It’s that hse seems to have believed that his partner could give him permission to make her uncomfortable. 

It is easy to hold up the stories told in the two Atlantic pieces against nostalgia for the good old days of respectability, which afforded a woman who chose to take advantage of it a great deal of protection from the predations of male sexuality. But that’s a mistake as well as a distraction. It’s a good thing that women can’t “fall” anymore — not even Karen Owen. The question isn’t who gets to have sex with whom. The question is what kind of sex is wrong for everybody. We seem to be on the same page about children and non-consensual sex — verboten. Perhaps those are the only workable general rules. But the idea that “sex is good full stop” is preposterously naive, and if the flower children of the Sixties may be forgiven for their ignorant excesses, no such innocence is available today. 

As an aside, I think that it’s worth thinking whether the uncorseting of the American libido had the side-effect of eliminating shame on the subject of income inequality.

David Leonhardt‘s overview of the “jobs slump” makes for dispiriting reasons, because describing the problem in economic terms infuses the discussion with helpless passivity. The root of the problem is social and political: the United States has become a country in which too many powerful people feel no less entitled to be rich than medieval aristocrats felt entitled to be privileged. Not only that, but too many ordinary Americans dream of becoming rich and powerful.

Policy makers could also help the unemployed by spreading economic pain more broadly among the population. I realize this idea may not sound so good at first. Who wants pain to spread? But the fact is that this downturn has concentrated its effects on a relatively narrow group of Americans.

In Germany and Canada, some companies and workers have averted layoffs by agreeing to cut everyone’s hours and, thus, pay. In this country, average wages for the employed have risen faster than inflation since 2007, which is highly unusual for a downturn. Yet unemployment remains terribly high, and almost half of the unemployed have been out of work for at least six months. These are the people bearing the brunt of the downturn.

Germany’s job-sharing program — known as “Kurzarbeit,” or short work — has won praise from both conservative and liberal economists. Senator Jack Reed, Democrat of Rhode Island, has offered a bill that would encourage similar programs. So far, though, the White House has not pursued it aggressively. Perhaps Gene Sperling, the new director of the National Economic Council, can put it back on the agenda.

Kurzarbeit is a great idea, and it may take hold here, eventually — but probably not because it eases any pain.

We refer to American television audiences, deemed unready for a miniseries about the Kennedys that, like any miniseries, has a story to tell and grants itself artistic license to do so. Dave Itzkoff‘s report is probably about as clear as this murky business permits.

The announcement by History in December 2009 that it was planning to show “The Kennedys” was a major step for it into scripted programming. It came at a time when History, a cable channel owned by A&E Television Networks, was shedding its reputation for musty war documentaries in favor of red-blooded reality shows like “Ax Men” and “Ice Road Truckers.” The move was meant to bring History prestige, as well as to establish a connection to the “Kennedys” producer Joel Surnow, an Emmy Award-winning co-creator of the Fox series “24” and outspoken political conservative.

But on Jan. 7, History announced that it would not broadcast “The Kennedys” after all. It said, “After viewing the final product in its totality, we have concluded this dramatic interpretation is not a fit for the History brand.” Starz, FX and Showtime also passed on the project. “The Kennedys,” produced by Muse Entertainment, a Canadian company, and Asylum Entertainment in the United States, is scheduled to be shown in the coming months in 30 countries, including Canada and Britain. DirecTV, a subscription satellite television service, has expressed interest in showing the mini-series in the United States but said on Monday that it had not yet seen it.

The cryptic statement from History seemed to reflect criticism that dogged the project for months, even before it started production. In February a group of historians organized by a liberal filmmaker, Robert Greenwald, issued a condemnation based on early drafts of scripts obtained by Mr. Greenwald. These historians said the scripts contained factual errors, fabrications and more than a dash of salacious innuendo. Among the critics was Theodore C. Sorensen, the longtime adviser and speechwriter to President Kennedy. (Mr. Sorensen died in October.)

This quibbling over degrees of trash is incredibly fatuous.

There were two stories in this morning’s Times that interested me even more when I sensed that there was a connection between them. The connection is not obvious, and I want to try to work it out here.

The first piece is David Brooks’s column about Amy Chua. Amy Chua is a lawyer of Chinese background who, in her book, Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, describes her career as a very tough mom. Brooks’s “paradoxical” point is that she’s not tough at all; on the contrary, Chua is protecting her daughters from the tough cognitive tests that determine both success and happiness in life. This carries forward the thinking that Brooks outlined in his New Yorker essay last week, and underlines my conclusion that an educational model that takes the cognitive revolution into account will put much less emphasis on individual examinations than today’s best schools do. Chua, subscribing to the received wisdom that finds a high correlation between achievement and advancement, imposed upon her daughters a rigorous program of “practice makes perfect,” neither questioning the value of perfection nor assessing its cost. We agree witr Brooks that this is not very intelligent. 

Practicing a piece of music for four hours requires focused attention, but it is nowhere near as cognitively demanding as a sleepover with 14-year-old girls. Managing status rivalries, negotiating group dynamics, understanding social norms, navigating the distinction between self and group — these and other social tests impose cognitive demands that blow away any intense tutoring session or a class at Yale.

The other piece is about Apple. Steve Jobs is ailing, and he’ll be taking another leave of absence from running the company. Miguel Helft and Claire Cain Miller report that the “deep bench” of leaders at Apple ought to insure its continued success. But they quote a couple of observers who aren’t so sure. One of them is David Yoffie, a professor at the Harvard Business School. 

“The company could not thrive if Steve didn’t have an extremely talented team around him,” said David B. Yoffie, a professor at Harvard Business School who has studied the technology industry for decades. “But you can’t replace Steve on some levels.” 

Mr. Yoffie and others said Mr. Jobs’s creativity, obsession with a product’s design and function, and management style, as well as the force of his personality, were unusual, not only in Silicon Valley, but also in American business. They said that it would take several people with different skills to fill Mr. Jobs’s shoes.

The reinvention of Steve Jobs is one of the most interesting stories in American business. Always a visionary as well as a gifted engineer, Mr Jobs appears to have lacked good people skills in his first shift at Apple’s helm. He was tossed out of his own company, and languished in the wilderness for over ten years. For the past fifteen years, he has shown himself to be the nucleus of a brilliantly creative team. That I call him the nucleus of the team rather than its leader is an indication of the connection that I see between the two stories. A leader is much easier to replace than a nucleus; it’s also much easier to measure the effectiveness of a leader. Leadership is just another individual skill that can be learned. By “nucleus,” I have something far more complex in mind: the center of a web of semi-conscious (or even unconscious) signals, suggestions, cues, and associations that bind Apple’s top engineers and marketers in a productive unit. Steve Jobs runs that web — again, I would argue, unconsciously. I have no idea what lessons he learned during his exile, but it is not necessary that becoming a more “understanding” leader was one of them. The only thing that Mr Jobs had to understand, at the end of the day, was how to pick compatible executives. (And this may be nothing more or less complicated than a matter of wearing clothes — although the heir-apparent, Timothy Cook, looks as if he’d be much more comfortable in a jacket and tie.) All he had to learn was how to be a more powerful nucleus, a more efficient reader and emitter of personal communications. Insofar as the result was to unleash the true power of Steve Jobs — and this does seem to be what happened — then it is very unlikely that Apple will continue on its course of staggeringly successful innovation. 

Continuing on that course may not be necessary for Apple to continue to be a successful enterprise — but that’s a matter for some other time. My point is that Apple’s success under Steve Jobs appears to have depended on the very skills that, in David Brooks’s view, Amy Chua has denied her daughters the pportunity to acquire. We certainly don’t know very much about teaching them.

Despite huge alterations in the window dressing, we see little difference between Ashley Parker‘s account of the Washington feed warriors who get up at four in the morning to keep their powerful bosses informed and the sociology of courtly life outlined decades ago by Norbert Elias.

Mr. Maldonado, 26, is one of the dozens of young aides throughout the city who rise before dawn to pore over the news to synthesize it, summarize it and spin it, so their bosses start the day well-prepared. Washington is a city that traffics in information, and as these 20-something staff members are learning, who knows what — and when they know it — can be the difference between professional advancement and barely scraping by.

“Information is the capital market of Washington, so you know something that other people don’t know and you know something earlier than other people know it is a formulation for increasing your status and power,” said David Perlmutter, the director of the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Iowa. “So any edge you can use to get stuff faster, earlier, better or exclusively is very important.”

For Mr. Maldonado, who said that “the information wars are won before work,” that means rising early to browse all of the major newspapers, new polling data, ideological Web sites and dozens of news alerts needed to equip his bosses with the best, most up-to-date nuggets.

We wish that we’d known about “713 to 212,” a jazz festival centered on musicians who studied at Houston’s High School for Performing and Visual Arts; we didn’t even know that the 92nd Street Y has a Tribeca branch!

Beginning at that time Jason Moran, the pianist from Houston’s Third Ward who’d moved to New York in 1993, was getting around all kinds of normative ideas about jazz style and repertory, but he didn’t isolate himself from the jazz tradition. He swiped inspiration from all over the place — visual art, film, the music of spoken conversation in foreign languages — but also played with Greg Osby and Sam Rivers and Charles Lloyd and Wayne Shorter. He was having it both ways. If asked what formed him, he’d talk about his teachers, and that would lead him to talk about Houston and the school he attended for three years there: the High School for the Performing and Visual Arts.

Then, in a steady rollout, you noticed other young musicians from that same school, most of whom had studied with the same teacher, Robert Morgan. The drummers Eric Harland, Kendrick Scott, Chris Dave and Jamire Williams. The trombonist Corey King. The guitarist Mike Moreno. The pianists Robert Glasper and Helen Sung. The trumpeters Leron Thomas and Brandon Lee. The bassists Burniss Earl Travis and Mark Kelley and Marcos Varela. If you looked a little beyond jazz, you saw Josh Mease and Alan Hampton, putting crazy chord sequences into something like folk-pop, and Bryan-Michael Cox, who was writing and producing for R&B stars.

All but one of them came to the 92nd Street Y’s TriBeCa branch on Friday and Saturday nights for an event organized by Mr. Moran called “713 to 212: Houstonians in NYC.” (The exception was Mr. Cox, scheduled to participate but unable to make it out of Atlanta in time.) Dr. Morgan, affable and energetic, was there too, talking in a preconcert panel discussion on Saturday. So were some Houston players of older generations: the tenor saxophonist Billy Harper, the trumpeter Ku-umba Frank Lacy, the drummer Michael Carvin, the trumpeter Tex Allen, the guitarist Melvin Sparks.

Our usual source for information of this kind has been very busy lately. For just over a year, in fact.

Lordy, am I tired. If I weren’t so tired, I’d finish that there sentence with an exclamation point, but I’m not up to the shifting. I couldn’t get out of bed this morning until eleven. I spent most of the afternoon reorganizing a closet. There are freshwater fish with more interesting things on their minds. I read Tony Judt’s piece about trains in the New York Review of Books. It was exactly congruent with my thoughts about the future of transportation; when I think of the future of this country, I see a solitary state taking shape along Amtrak’s Northeast Corridor line. As I say, though, I’m much too tired to develop these thoughts.

If we were not going to dinner with a friend, I would try to take Kathleen to see True Grit this evening. That’s why I saw it on Friday, and not something else: I was vetting the violence, which, in the event, turns out to be nowhere near as great as we had been led to believe. (It’s not as violent as Fargo, for example — probably because you expect more shootouts in Nineteenth-Century Arkansas than you do in contemporary Minneapolis.) Such violence as there is is usually clearly foreseeable, giving Kathleen time to cover her eyes. (I covered mine during that scene with the rattlesnake; it did no good at all.) As I say, though, we have a date to do something else.

If I weren’t so tired, I would fast-forward through the Brahms piano sonata that is playing right now. I never know which is which; they all sound the same. Ponderous. You can see why pianos in Brahms’s day had to have such stout legs: all that pounding! I thought that repeated exposure on one or two of the playlists would teach me to love them, but it’s not happening. As I say, though, I’m too tired to think of anything else to play.

Pray that I don’t fall into my soup.